We left Franz Josef and headed north towards Hokitika and the famous old gold mining areas, it was raining yet again. It often rains on the West Coast, close to the sea they have about 5 m of rain annually, but up in the Southern Alps the figure gets as high as 12m!!

We got to a soggy Hokitika mid morning and ventured to the i-site to try to find something to do in the rain for a few hours. Hokitika is famous for its Jade (nephrite/greenstone), it was precious to the Maoris for it's beauty and its strength, now it is mainly used in jewelery. It is possible to go and try your hand at carving your very own personalized souvenir, but this was quite expensive and as the budget has gone we wanted to do something free so we decided on the Blue Spur drive followed by a walk around some old gold mine workings (if the weather had improved!!).

After lunch there was a break in the rain so I tried my hand at some gold-panning also known as fossicking (improvising using a plastic plate) hoping to find a big nugget to recoup some of the costs of NZ, all my efforts were in vain as I found absolutely nothing!! To cheer me up we went for a walk around some old gold workings, lots of mine shafts, tunnels, streams etc. The path was pretty wet when we started and halfway the walk the path turned into a stream and went through a really narrow bit, this meant an early return to the car, which was a good thing as it has just started to chuck it down again.

We continued up the coast to go and see Punakaiki, pancake rocks and blow holes. We stopped briefly on route as we managed to find the 'caution penguin' sign that had been eluding us - even in the areas we had seen penguins!! Punakaiki is really famous for its crazy rock formations and 3 blow holes. Unfortunately when we arrived it wasn't high tide to we didn't get much blow hole action, what there was it was due to the very rough sea, but it had stopped raining at least! The rocks were crazy and geologists and scientists still can't work out how exactly these rocks are formed.

The following day we began our cross country route over Arthur's Pass heading towards Christchurch via Greymouth to sort out changing our bus and ferry on Sunday so we can watch the cup final - we were successful, lets just hope England can rise to the occasion! Yet again it was raining, it doesn't seem to drizzle here, it only rains hard!! Just past the village at the top of Arthur's Pass we decided we had had enough and found a shelter with a fireplace in it so we decided to stop there for the night. A real fire was really good, apart from we only had very limited wood as everything outside was sodden. With nothing better to do we went to bed early just as a huge thunderstorm started and the rain managed to get even heavier at one point we had hail the size of marbles hammering down on the camper!! We worked out that in the 80 hours leading up to here we had only had about 10 hours without it pouring down - now we know why there is so much greenery and RAINforest!!

Off to the Banks Peninsula in the morning - apparently the weather is better on the east coast - fingers crossed!!

Lots of love

A&S xxx